Course
Review written: October 2025
Course Format:
The course reviewed is Hack Smarter's Sliver C2: Pentesting and Evasion by Tyler Ramsbey.
Course Materials:
This course material is online content which is made up of both videos and text.
Class size:
The online content is just for the student.
Lab Environment
The lab environment is just for the student and accessible through an OpenVPN configuration that can be downloaded, or some machines were accessible through the web when I was going through the course.
Estimated cost:
The course price was listed as follows (Check the web site for actual prices!)
$119.99 one-time purchase (but at the time I signed up, and as of when I posted this review, the price was $59.99 which is -50% off the regular price.)
My motivation:
Most of my real world experience has been with Cobalt Strike, but I have used a few other C2s, and I have done several training courses, and CTFs, with Sliver, Havoc, and Mythic and probably a few others that I have forgotten about now. Recently I have used Sliver more and more, and I thought this would be a good chance to learn a little more and get more practice.
Review:
NOTE:
There are 20+ custom labs and 80 hours of lab time. I went through the labs, did the Capstone (on my own and following along with Tyler), left the environment running and ran to the store, left the environment running and totally forgot about it and didn't come back to the computer for a while, was typing this review and realized I wanted to try and see if I could get an idea I had to work and used the lab for a while, and I still have more than half my time left. Trust Tyler when he says that he gave you plenty of lab time to try stuff out.
The course:
There are 8 sections with 27 subsections. (I have not added up the total video time yet.)
Welcome To The Course!
The Course Introduction just gives an overview of the course, and a bit of background about Tyler. It also mentions some requirements for the course which are all fairly basic. There is also mention of support for the course as well as a referral fee on any closed deals that you help secure.
Introduction to C2 Frameworks
This section covers what a C2 Framework is, some common C2 Frameworks, why this course covers Sliver, plus a disclaimer and take this seriously so you do not go to prison lesson.
Sliver Architecture
This section covers more information on Sliver (Servers, Implants, and Beacons), supported protocols, a demo of installing Sliver on a Kali Linux VM, a demo of Exploring the CLI and console interface, and then you are launched in to your first lab using your Kali Linux VM (and a demo showing you step-by-step how to accomplish the lab.)
Listener and Implant Creation
This section is where the fun begins. It starts with some fundamentals of payloads (also known as implants), followed by a brief introduction on how to use the Hack Smarter hands-on labs, and then you start your first two hands-on labs. These are easy and a good start for the hands-on portion.
Session Management & Post Exploitation
Unlocking the Armory, as well as the top five Armory tools that are recommended, are covered at the start of this section. I ended up just installing all the Armory tools, and I used several of them to make my lab time a much different experience than what is shown in the demos. There are five hands-on labs, with five demos of those hands-on labs. When I did "Lab: Privilege Escalation" I ended up making a Sliver payload that didn't die after a few seconds...so I challenge you to do a little research and figure this out on your own (you have plenty of lab time to play around and experiment). But even if you don't use the method I used, the getsystem command is a pretty easy way to get a stable session without trying to run 'ps' and migrate to get into a process before the session dies. I also did the LSASS lab different than the demo, but it basically did the exact same thing.
Pivoting & Persistence
The pivoting & persistence section contains important information to learn. Pivoting can often be hard to understand, but Tyler does a great job explaining things. There are three persistence methods covered, making that a good starting point for learning Windows persistence.
Detection & Evasion
This section starts with some introductions, and then moves in to static evasion, runtime evasion (living of the land, process injection {thread injection/process hollowing/process doppleganging), process injection/migration, c2 stager for Sliver, and bypassing Windows Defender. This is a great high level introduction to evasion, and working with Nim was pretty fun for me as it is something that I have wanted to get more hands-on experience with.
Side bar: Oh my goodness.... this is so awesome. I set myself a goal to modify the Nim program that Tyler provides for the Sliver C2 Stager lesson because I ran into an issue that had been bugging me. I started the labs again, fired up ChatGPT, and started playing around in my lab with some vibe code. Mission accomplished: now I have a stable call back! I uploaded the code that ChatGPT created for me to my GitHub page (https://github.com/redteamtrainingreviews/NimStuff) and if you wish to use it, you will need to modify it to include the code that Tyler provides.
Capstone Project
These sections cover the Capstone Challenge. I recommend that you at least attempt the challenge on you own. Everything you need is in the sections prior to the Capstone Challenge.
Once you either complete the Capstone Challenge, or you reach a point where you can not continue on your own, there are six different videos that provide a walkthrough of the challenge. If you hit a point you can't figure out, watch the video(s) up to that point, then try to finish on your own.
Misc:
The course was a lot shorter than I thought it was going to be based off all the stuff covered (probably because I had a solid foundation to begin with and a lot of this was just review for me so I set the videos on 2x playback speed and raced through it all.) That being said, I did learn some things so that makes me very happy, and it did take me a while to go through it because of work and real life and lack of extra time.
I really appreciate a course that pushes me to do more and this course did push me to do more (and once I understand Nim better) maybe I will push myself to do even more.
The Exam:
There is currently no certification exam for this course, but you can use the Capstone Challenge as your mini exam since you need to last flag to complete the section.
Certificate of Completion (with my account name and verification code stripped out)
My two cents:
I had a lot of fun with this course. It was short and sweet, packed full of great information, and it provides the foundations needed for using Sliver. I highly recommend this course.
I still need more practice with Sliver. It is still really awkward for me to use, and I keep looking for things that I am used to in other C2s, and when I don't find them or they work differently, I have to try and figure out how to do them in Sliver. But I still have plenty of lab time so I may spend more time trying to better myself and my Sliver skills.